AP Chemistry Score Distributions
Past paper download links for each year can be found here here.
This page summarises the published AP Chemistry score distributions for the six most recent exam years: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
Instead of publishing a simple raw mark boundary for each score, College Board reports the percentage of students who achieved each AP score from 1 to 5.
Average score distribution based on all years
- Score 5 = 14.4% of students on average
- Score 4 = 22.5% of students on average
- Score 3 = 28.1% of students on average
- Score 2 = 20.3% of students on average
- Score 1 = 14.7% of students on average
- Score 3 or higher = 65.0% of students on average
- Average mean score = 3.01
Year-by-Year AP Chemistry Score Distributions
These figures show the percentage of AP Chemistry students who achieved each score in each exam year.
| Year | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 3 or higher | Test takers | Mean score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 17.9% | 28.6% | 31.4% | 15.9% | 6.2% | 77.9% | 168,833 | 3.36 |
| 2024 | 17.9% | 27.4% | 30.3% | 16.9% | 7.5% | 75.6% | 151,121 | 3.31 |
| 2023 | 16.0% | 27.1% | 32.0% | 16.9% | 8.0% | 75.1% | 139,448 | 3.26 |
| 2022 | 12.5% | 17.0% | 24.5% | 23.6% | 22.5% | 54.0% | 124,780 | 2.73 |
| 2021 | 11.2% | 16.4% | 23.7% | 24.7% | 23.9% | 51.3% | 134,316 | 2.66 |
| 2020 | 10.6% | 18.6% | 26.9% | 24.0% | 19.9% | 56.1% | 145,540 | 2.76 |
Do not treat AP score distributions as fixed grade boundaries. They show what happened in previous years, but they do not tell you the exact raw mark needed for a 3, 4 or 5 in the next exam.
Why This Is Different from IB and A-Level Grade Boundaries
For many post-16 chemistry courses (like IB and A-level), exam boards publish raw mark boundaries such as “239 out of 300 for an A*”. AP Chemistry is different. The final AP score is reported on a 1 to 5 scale, and the public data is mainly shown as score distributions.
That means this page is best used to answer questions like:
- What percentage of students got a 5 in AP Chemistry?
- How common is a score of 3 or higher?
- Was the score distribution higher or lower in a particular year?
- How has AP Chemistry performance changed over recent years?
Rather than 'What percent score do I need to achieve a 5?'
Sources
The data on this page is taken from official College Board AP score distribution data.